Trying To Help Katrina Victims Enough To Drive One To Bad Words

Ask Susan Halstead, West Hartford's director of human services, how goes the effort to resettle Hurricane Katrina's evacuees, and her answer includes a bad word and ``cluster.''

Forgive Halstead her profanity, but she's been with the town 22 years and never has hit so many brick walls in procuring help for people who need it. She wants to aid the eight or so new residents the town has welcomed since the August catastrophe, but she can't get the appropriate government and non-government aid people on the phone. On several occasions during her round-robin calls -- to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the American Red Cross, you name it -- she's actually been referred back to her own office.

Last week, the West Hartford Town Council passed a resolution that committed the town to helping evacuees. It was wide-reaching and good-hearted, but there is no one coordinating state efforts to resettle people, long-term or permanently. Across the state, good-hearted individuals and faith-based groups -- bless them -- have stepped in, but pure hearts can keep the effort going only for so long.

Before FEMA suspended evacuee flights to Connecticut, Gov. M. Jodi Rell invited 1,500 Katrina survivors to the Nutmeg State. Because Halstead assumed her town would gather in some of these people, she fired off an e-mail asking for guidance. The reply was a canned response telling her how she could volunteer. The state has roughly 800 evacuees now, according to the governor's office, although that number is decreasing daily as people return to the Gulf Coast.

The situation isn't entirely without hope. For a moment early this week, Halstead thought she'd have to hold a bake sale to raise money for housing for one family with a high school student, but Tuesday that family received the necessary help from the state Department of Social Services.

But overall? Access to aid is tangled, and help moves too slow. And while you can imagine Halstead's frustration, imagine, too, the experience of the state's evacuees, the lines they're standing in, the government workers facing them across the counters who tear up at their stories but are unable to snip through the red tape that traps people who need help.

Last week, the president stood in New Orleans' French Quarter and promised massive aid to rebuild the stricken coast. (Did anyone else thrill to the notion that the president has recently discovered that we have poor people in America and that someone ought to do something about that, gosh darn it?)

In fact, the language could have been lifted from the script for Iraq. Both sites are reeling from catastrophes -- a despot and a ground war in one, a hellish hurricane and slow or nonexistent government response in another. Both contain areas of grinding poverty that should be addressed systemically. Both have attracted the best and worst kinds of people -- those who want desperately to help, and those looking to benefit financially from the turmoil. Both events have helped widen the crevice between the country's two major political parties. And both have received a government's promise to rebuild -- with a host of no-bid contracts from companies that will make a smart penny off the whole mess.

Here's the irony: Helping others is as American as apple pie. First come the winds and rain, then comes the casserole brigade -- regular everyday folks who want to do something, anything, to ease the suffering. Why, then, does that same spirit not translate to workable public policy? You can take off your necktie and roll up your sleeves and stand in front of cameras from now until New Orleans dries up, but these evacuees need far more than a big, ugly photo op. Susan Campbell is at Campbell@courant.com or 860-241-6454.